Art to see in Rome and the Vatican

The most famous art in Rome is in the Vatican Museums, with Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, Raphael's The School of Athens and the ancient Laocoön Group. In the city's churches Caravaggio's paintings still hang where they were once commissioned, and Bernini's sculptures and fountains are in the Galleria Borghese and in the city's squares. Rome is a city where much of the art is still in the places it was made for.

Facts

The Vatican Museums: from the Laocoön to Raphael

The Vatican Museums are really a long series of museums in the popes' palaces, and the way to the Sistine Chapel is long. The collections began with the ancient sculptures that Pope Julius II set up in the Belvedere Courtyard in the early 16th century. The most famous is the Laocoön Group, the priest and his sons struggling with the sea serpents. The group was unearthed in a vineyard in Rome in January 1506, and Michelangelo was present when the find was examined. The tensed muscles and the face in agony show how Hellenistic art wanted to arouse feeling and not merely show ideals.

Further on are Raphael's Rooms, which Raphael and his workshop painted for the same pope. In the Stanza della Segnatura is The School of Athens, with Plato and Aristotle in the middle and the philosophers of antiquity around them in a vast vaulted architecture. The frescoes were painted around 1509–1511, at the same time as Michelangelo was working in the chapel a little way off. Read the guide The School of Athens: who is who? before you go, and you will find Diogenes on the steps and Raphael himself at the far right. The app also has an image of the fresco to point at, where the figures have names.

The Sistine Chapel

The chapel is the end of the tour, and it is almost always crowded. Michelangelo painted the ceiling in 1508–1512 on the commission of Julius II. In the middle nine scenes from Genesis are told, and the most famous of them is The Creation of Adam, in which the index fingers of God and Adam almost meet. The gap between the hands is the centre of the picture: life has not yet been transmitted. Around the scenes sit prophets and sibyls and the naked young men known as ignudi.

Michelangelo painted standing on a scaffold he designed himself, with his head tilted back, and he did not lie on his back, as is often said. Later he returned and painted the Last Judgement on the altar wall. The restoration in the 1980s removed soot and old layers of glue and varnish, and the clear colours that can be seen today emerged. Do not forget the walls, where Botticelli and other 15th-century masters painted scenes from the lives of Moses and Christ before the ceiling even existed. How true fresco is painted in wet plaster is explained in the guide to fresco, tempera and oil.

Caravaggio in the city's churches

One of Rome's great advantages is that much of the art is still where it was commissioned. In the French national church of San Luigi dei Francesi, near Piazza Navona, hang Caravaggio's three paintings of the apostle Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel. The Calling of St Matthew was shown in 1600 and was his first major public commission. Jesus points into a half-dark room where the tax collector sits with his companions counting money, and a sharp light falls in at an angle from the right along his arm. Which of the men at the table is Matthew is in fact still debated.

The church is free to visit, but the chapel is dark, and a small fee switches on the lighting for a while. The picture drew young painters from all over Europe, and how its light and dark work is explained in the guide to sfumato and chiaroscuro. More works by Caravaggio are found in the churches of Sant’Agostino and Santa Maria del Popolo, and in the Galleria Borghese.

Bernini: sculptor and city-builder

Gian Lorenzo Bernini shaped Baroque Rome more than anyone else. His breakthrough came with the marble groups for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in the 1620s, which still stand in the Galleria Borghese. In Pluto and Proserpina the god's fingers press into the girl's thigh as if the stone were skin, and in Apollo and Daphne leaves and roots grow out of the nymph while the god grasps at her. The museum admits visitors only with a booked time, so the ticket must be arranged in advance.

Bernini was also an architect, and he therefore appears in both the art and the architecture sections. He made the bronze baldachin over the papal altar in St Peter's Basilica and the two colonnades that embrace St Peter's Square. In Piazza Navona stands his Fountain of the Four Rivers, and in the small oval church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale the space becomes a theatre in which the apostle Andrew ascends towards the dome. In Santa Maria della Vittoria is The Ecstasy of St Teresa, where a hidden window lets the light fall over the saint. His rival Francesco Borromini is taken up in the guide Bernini and Borromini.

Antiquity, the Renaissance and the Baroque in the cityscape

The ancient city lies in the middle of the modern one. The Pantheon, built under the Emperor Hadrian, has a dome of cast concrete with an open eye at the top, and the space is as high as it is wide, 43 metres. The Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine and Trajan's Column are within walking distance of one another. The column is itself one of the great works of art of antiquity: a band of relief winds 23 times around the shaft and tells of the emperor's wars against the Dacians.

The Renaissance can be seen in the Tempietto, Bramante's small round temple on the spot where Peter was traditionally crucified, and in the Palazzo Farnese, where Michelangelo designed the heavy cornice. The palace is today the French embassy, but inside, in the gallery, are Annibale Carracci's ceiling frescoes. The Jesuits' Il Gesù shows the Baroque at full strength: in the ceiling fresco heaven seems to pour into the church, and figures in stucco glide out over the edge of the frame. The architecture section's guide Architecture in Rome goes through the city's buildings from antiquity to today.

The artists who came to Rome

In the app's data 32 artists have Rome as a place of activity, from Fra Angelico in the 15th century to Giorgio de Chirico in the 20th. For several hundred years a period in Rome was part of the training of artists from all over Europe. Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain lived there for most of their lives, and Rubens worked in the city for a few years in the early 17th century.

For Swedes Rome was just as important. Johan Tobias Sergel lived there in 1767–1778 and carved his Faun in the spirit of antiquity, and the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen stayed for over forty years. The sculptors Byström and Fogelberg lived in Rome in the first half of the 19th century, and Carl Milles spent a large part of his last years there. In the network you can see who was in the city at the same time.

How to plan your visit

The Vatican Museums and St Peter's Basilica are next to each other but have different entrances and queues. Book a ticket to the museums in advance and allow half a day; for the Galleria Borghese booking is a requirement. The churches in the centre, such as San Luigi dei Francesi, Sant’Agostino and Santa Maria del Popolo, are free to enter but often close in the middle of the day. Cover shoulders and knees in the churches and in St Peter's.

Do read the guide to the Baroque to understand Caravaggio and Bernini, and the one on the Renaissance for Raphael and Michelangelo. On the app's map the Vatican Museums and San Luigi dei Francesi are marked. The guides to Paris and Stockholm do the same for two other cities.

Don't miss

Exercise

Where does Caravaggio's The Calling of St Matthew hang?